Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB

(laurent.le-brun.eu)

71 points | by laurentlb 5 days ago

5 comments

  • vegabook 4 hours ago
    It's incredibly satisfying to see the polar opposite of the usual LLM/superDB/K8/CICD/Cloud/Container/Crapola corpobloat we hear about on this site all the time, namely a tiny piece of handcrafted code, ironically produce something infinitely more aesthetically beautiful, and intellectually interesting from an almost artisan engineering perspective.
    • llmslave2 1 hour ago
      Especially because some framework slopper using all the LLM's and bloat in the world could never even imagine reaching this level of productivity. In 7 (SEVEN) days this coder

      - Designed a language.

      - Implemented a compiler to compile it to bytecode, using F#.

      - Wrote a bytecode interpreter, using C++.

      - Created a shoot’em up game, using the custom language.

      - Renderd the graphics, using a single GLSL shader.

  • jstrieb 5 hours ago
    The rest of the games submitted to this very interesting, somewhat niche game jam (including my own entry) are here:

    https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam/entries

    There were some really impressive submissions in spite of the short time frame!

    • azhenley 5 hours ago
      The jam was originally going to be just me doing a solo project but it grew much larger! Over 200 people joined the Discord.

      We plan on running it again: https://langjamgamejam.com/

      • jstrieb 4 hours ago
        Maybe I missed it, but I didn't notice a submission of yours in the jam. Did you end up getting around to doing your solo project?
    • reidrac 1 hour ago
      Dungeon-Specific Language (DSL)

      Cheff kiss!

  • NooneAtAll3 4 hours ago
    Reminds me of https://js13kgames.com/ where people managed to do a whole air sim in 13kb (out of many other things)
  • PaulHoule 6 hours ago
    Such a beautiful technique for shoehorning straight out of the 1970s! See also

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

    and

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

    It seems so un-FORTRAN that DEC had a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-11. that was based on a stack machine and then later built an FP accelerator specialized to accelerate the stack machine. It was a straggler but I'm still trying to track down a circa 1992 article from Dr. Dobb's Journal where someone used virtual machine techniques to unbreak the broken i860 and make a good FORTRAN compiler.

  • nsxwolf 7 hours ago
    What's that overall filter that covers the view? Is it supposed to look like a late 80s passive matrix color LCD screen?

    Edit: Thanks for the downvote, guess I shouldn't have paid any attention to this post at all?

    • macintux 3 hours ago
      Worth noting that it's easy (and probably fairly frequent) to click the wrong arrow, especially on a phone screen. I've started double-checking the "unvote" vs "undown" link that appears afterwards to make sure I hit the right one.
      • somat 2 hours ago
        So that's how you tell, salutes. Sometimes I worry that I inadvertently downvoted someone by mistake. "But you can just unvote if that happens" sure but how do you tell what was voted.

        Anyhow, I think if this was my forum I would put the downvote selector at the end of the comment title and have the upvote selector at the beginning.